Warfare (Preview)
Reviewed by Michael Sandlin

Produced by Andrew McDonald, Allon Reich, Matthew Penry-Davey, and Peter Rice; written and directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza; cinematography by David J. Thompson; production design by Mark Digby; edited by Fin Oates; costume design by David Crossman and Neil Murphy; sound design by Glen Fremantle; starring Joseph Quinn, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Cosmo Jarvis, Aaron Mackenzie, Alex Brockdorff, and Will Poulter. Color, 95 min. 2025. An A24 Films release.

While the 2000s may have proved to be a golden age for political documentaries on the fraudulence of the Bush/Cheney “War on Terror,” the major antiwar fiction features from that era were unprofitable downer critiques of U.S. intervention in the Middle East—American Soldiers (2005), Lions for Lambs, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, and Battle for Haditha (the latter four from 2007 alone!), among others. To some degree, all were intelligent, hard-hitting antiwar “message” films that general audiences simply weren’t ready for. In the 2020s, as the lurid details of the “War on Terror” become a distant memory, we’ve seen an ever-increasing number of hugely popular action-packed blockbusters exploiting the once deeply unpopular Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Suffice to say, long gone are the days where films about U.S. involvement in the Middle East offered any serious contextual space to the far-right Bush/Cheney war-profiteer politics that fueled those disastrous conflicts for so many years.

The crucial pivot point seemed to be the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker (2009), which legitimized U.S. intervention in the region and emphasized acts of fanatical American bravery while ignoring U.S. war crimes and tactical blunders in the region (and made $49 million in box office receipts). Zero Dark Thirty (2012) (a $132 million box-office hit) upped the flag-waving hysteria, featuring a casually sadistic female protagonist whose lust for torture and extrajudiciary killing lands her somewhere on the psychological spectrum between Misery’s Annie Wilkes and Dyanne Thorne’s prison camp commandant in Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS. This rightward political shift was only reinforced by the cash-generating ultraconservative conformism of American Sniper (2014), the cinematic equivalent of a Lee Greenwood song. This Clint Eastwood-directed liberal-baiting snooze-fest predictably hero-worshipped the Bolshevik-like patriotism and deadly aim of Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle—the Charles Whitman of the Iraq War—feting him as the Great White Protector God of Bush/Cheney petroleum interests in the region.

Entering the Iraqsploitation fray in 2025 is Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s codirectorial debut, Warfare. Will this Iraq war-themed film play any legitimate part in reiterating the political and moral failures of the decade-long catastrophe in Iraq? Hint: maybe, depending on how much interpretive turf one is willing to fight for here, given that Garland is notoriously stingy with meaning in his films, Warfare included. Warfare, on its surface, has more in common with the second wave of films, released in the 2010s and 2020s, about U.S. wars in the Middle East, where antiwar activism has been noticeably omitted in favor of more profitable shock-and-awe violence and reactionary 9/11 revenge fantasies. On its surface, Warfare is certainly something of a technical improvement on the cheeseball FX-driven spectacle Garland gave us with 2023’s Civil War [see this author’s review in Cineaste, Fall 2024], which amounted to a cravenly opportunistic, fashion-forward music video/war fantasy that did little more than exploit and trivialize America’s deep political divide.

Yet Warfare, much like Civil War, is an overhyped cinematic experiment in impartial “reality.” In Civil War Garland dodged substantive political context and in-depth human stories in service of a narrow formal conceit that claims to show only the film’s fictional internecine U.S. conflict through the “objective” lenses of its bitchy road-tripping Reuters photojournalists. And unfortunately, this obnoxious notion of an artistically pure objectivity that Civil War’s photojournalists (“don’t ask questions, just take pictures”) subscribe to also worms its way into Warfare: in the form of a supposedly faithful real-time hour-plus reenactment of a 2006 urban skirmish near Ramadi, Iraq. It all begins when a squad of Navy SEALs gets trapped in an apartment building that they were supposed to occupy only temporarily; unluckily, they’ve found themselves right next to an insurgent house and are soon besieged on all sides by automatic gunfire, grenades, and a few improvised explosive devices (IEDs). We’re also told that the chaos that follows is pieced together from the “memories” of the SEALs who fought there (Mendoza himself being one of the U.S. Navy’s Sea, Air, and Land team). But anyone who’s anyone knows that “memory” and “reality” are rarely compatible bedfellows.

For starters, Warfare’s opening scene isn’t much of an envelope pusher. The co-directors force us to watch the sexually hard-up predeployment SEAL team in collective orgasmic frenzy over some lame Jane Fonda-copycat aerobics video—possibly one of the silliest male-bonding beginnings to any war movie in history. (As a purposely unfair comparison, consider, for one, the boozy, puke-stained pre-mission bacchanal-from-hell that opened 1982’s Das Boot). If this opening is faithful to the SEALs’ actual predeployment preamble, one wonders: couldn’t Halliburton have supplied these young bucks with more technologically advanced adult entertainment?

For better or worse, Warfare depicts Navy SEALs in a much less invincible light than most of us might be used to—especially if your idea of a SEAL is a coked-up killing machine like Charlie Sheen in 1990’s Navy Seals, or Steven Seagal’s monosyllabic Navy SEAL-turned-cook in the (yes, that’s right) Academy Award-nominated Under Siege (1992), in which Seagal’s martial arts skills prove to be as formidable as his short-order culinary talents. Then, obviously, there’s Zero Dark Thirty’s portrayal of the SEALs as hypercompetent assassins cheerily polishing off Osama bin Laden like an after-dinner aperitif. And Amazon Prime subscribers won’t soon forget the SEALs’ performance in the runaway Afghanistanisploitation hit, Lone Survivor (2013), in which a handful of frogmen—including Marky Mark Wahlberg himself—blow away half the Taliban before finally succumbing to around 150,000 bullet wounds apiece…

To read the complete article, click here so that you may order either a subscription to begin with our Fall 2025 issue, or order a copy of this issue.

Michael Sandlin, a Cineaste Contributing Writer, is a U.K-based writer and academic.

Copyright © 2025 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 4